Lionel Shriver wrote an excellent column in Saturday’s Times, pinch-hitting for Matthew Parris. She takes issue with the lazy journalistic habit of using the phrase “scientists say” to justify the attribution of extreme weather and wildfires to climate change, among other things. Here’s an extract:
The media, including the BBC, now robotically tack on to every story about a geological event or bad weather (all weather stories are bad stories; a good weather story is just a nice day) that “scientists say” the phenomenon is due to human-induced climate change. It’s obvious, too, that news gatherers no longer feel obliged to consult said “scientists” to ascribe every planetary unpleasantness to the burning of fossil fuels, because the “scientists say” mantra is trotted out with the unthinking habituality of “that’s all for tonight”. So we’re told the wildfires in Canada (also explained by other factors) and southern Europe and the heatwaves in Spain and the southwestern US are all caused by climate change, though you can be sure that if these same regions were unusually cold this summer that would be caused by climate change as well. There are even outliers determined to pin volcanoes and earthquakes on climate change. Any day now I expect to hear that soaring rates of gender dysphoria are caused by climate change.
Does this knee-jerk allegation, often unsupported by evidence, really serve the cause? Sloppy attributions on a daily basis sound like propaganda — because that’s what they are. Surely these reports would be more persuasive if a news presenter occasionally announced, “Scientists say that the wildfires in Maui may have little or nothing to do with climate change”. Wouldn’t that make the alarmist stories seem more reliable? Doesn’t this numbingly predictable and doctrinally partisan assertion regarding every event under the sun sneakily undermine the save-the-planet message with its suspicious consistency? While we’re at it, too, “the planet” doesn’t need saving. If the activists are right, we need saving. “The planet” will be happy as Larry, even if our species disappears.
The movement’s breathless hyperbole backfires as well. “Global warming” becomes “global heating” becomes, according to the UN secretary general, “global boiling”. “Climate change” becomes “the climate crisis” becomes “the climate emergency” becomes “climate breakdown” becomes “climate collapse”. Oddly, the effect is to have, increasingly, no effect. “Climate inferno”? “Climate whole-earth nuclear mushroom cloud”? Ho-hum.
In the past ten years, we’ve suffered no fewer than four international social manias: the transgender craze, #MeToo, Covid lockdowns, and post-Floydian Black Lives Matter. Having accelerated from scientific hypothesis to fever dream, climate change apocalypticism now displays all the markers of another mania. Suddenly everyone thinks the same thing and says the same thing. The media, politicians, celebrities, the arts — they’re all in tell-tale accord. No dissent is allowed, and the few kooks who differ are denounced as murderous heretics who must be silenced or imprisoned. There is only one “truth”. Ironically, governed by an extreme, emotive, absolute “truth”, some politicians, journos, and experts just start making stuff up. The governor of Hawaii claimed that thanks to climate change Maui was subject to a “fire hurricane”. There’s no such thing as a “fire hurricane”.
Worth reading in full.
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They used to tack ‘Despite Brexit, …’ on the front of just about every economic success story.
Propaganda outlet.
This sort of re[orting is neither a mistake nor laziness. Like the Conservative government’s net zero policy and sky high immigration, it is wilfull. The world would indeed survive even if temperatures became ten or one hundred times the level they forecast in 100 years time. There would be no humans and the greenies would all be happy about that, and the bonus: no more greenines and no more lectures from the BBC.
Troble is we won’t see it because temperatures are not going to climb like that and many readers will no longer be alive!
This is the sort of article we need more of.
Climate Armaggedon? Can we try that next?
Yes but since when has Lionel been a woman’s name? Is the writer a man who identifies as a woman but wanted to keep his name? Confused…
She – Lionel – is a woman. She is also a Yank so that might explain the name.
Yes, a female woman who I seem to recall decided to use ‘Lionel’ as she didn’t like her given name of Margaret.
‘A rose by any other name…’ I think…
Bloody hell, “a female woman.”
What on earth is the world coming to?
Perhaps the name is deliberate to get people to shout at her, as men are concelled? She is a she, and very proud of it! Brilliant.
Ok good. “Not everything is climate change” is progess.
But the context is still that its not helpful to the actual battle against climate change because so much hyperbole makes people tune out.
So, plenty of way to go before we see comments I the mainstream that climate cha ge might just not be so.ething to worry about or perhaps even a thing.
Baby steps, I guess.
“In the past ten years, we’ve suffered no fewer than four international social manias: the transgender craze, #MeToo, Covid lockdowns, and post-Floydian Black Lives Matter.” As well as The EU Remoaners, now Rejoiners, Trump Derangement Syndrome, I Stand With Ukraine, Net Zero, Build Back Better. All the same people. Funny that, Toby…
Come on Tobes – get a grip man.
Sorry, but this is very superficial. It’s right (and pretty obvious) to point out that the propaganda has become a parody of itself, but unless we ask questions like Why?, Who is behind it? And what are they trying to achieve? we’re just scratching the surface.
The climate emergency is an emergency alright – it’s an emergency for anyone who likes autonomy and a future. We need to fight back with more than just pointing out the ludicrousness of it.
Well said!
To be fair, this illustrates where my concern lies just now and for the foreseeable. Everything else is just window dressing;
https://twitter.com/FatEmperor/status/1695216218230108165
Scared people are more easily manipulated. It’s the standard tactic of any totalitarian regime. People are being made feel like the world is coming to an end. Everyday, the media is full of eco-armageddon, people being cancelled for innocent statements that a week ago were fine or being victimised by ‘offence archaeology’. Men are afraid to communicate with women because comments can be manipulated into ‘assault’, women can destroy a man with a single false claim, women are out to destroy other women, men want single sex toilets as much as women do. Everyone is an oppressor.
There’s a social climate of terror and all its doing is make people communicate less in any depth. The root of all this is the UN. The UN was supposed to spread freedom and democracy, but given most countries are not free or democratic, they’ve made free countries less free. With the help of wealthy communists, who have gamed the capitalist system to make themselves rich, then spending the money attacking and undermining free countries from within, we’re facing an unprecedented attack on millennium-old freedoms in the West.
However, governments are squeezing too hard. And the harder they squeeze, the more their ability to control is slipping through their fingers. All it will take is Elon Musk’s X to create a complementary VPN and people can log in from ‘outside’ of the EU and avert the ‘Digital Mass-Censorship Act’.
It is worth mentioning that 70% of the planet think its all tosh and are not playing along.
Significantly, as long as the levers of power are controlled by a minority of as little as one per cent of fanatics, the rest of us have no power to stop them. The multinational and supranational organisations and the banking giants are the ones that need taking out. Somehow, we need to lobotomise them so the core autonomic functions they provide continue, but the ‘higher’ functions are cut off…
Fully agree, the Larry Finks of this world are keeping the sh-t show on the road.
Or as someone once said “Practical Politics is all about scaring the populace with an endless amount of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary, so they are clamouring to be led to safety” –Mechlen. ——Climate Change is just the latest hobgoblin but what a whopper
Oh Flash! We have 12 hours to save the Earth!
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-climate-change-cult-and-the-war-on-the-mind-3-2/
Psychologists now helping to make people “climate poorly” and then offering a cure.
Firkin barstewards.
Thanks for the link. Interesting read.
“The Mandibles” is an excellent and very re-readable book.
Blaming Climate Change for Everything is Evil
On this secular religious cult issue that masquerades as science we see everything that ever occurs as “due to climate change” or “is not inconsistent in a warmer world” or some other weasel words that in reality mean next to nothing. When everything that happens is due to your theory then it ISN’T science. Because that means you can say anything whatsoever is caused by climate change with NO EVIDENCE required, and there is no way to falsify the claim. Blaming everything on climate change is in some instances lazy, but it is mostly DELIBERATE. How can you ever be wrong when you cover every base?
I did a search on BBC website on “Maui Fire”. It produced far more links that I had time to explore so I just looked the first 10. None of them mentioned climate change. Here they are:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66596328
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66575234
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66518502
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66495015
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66507019
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66507827
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66489815
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-66453622
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-66460560 (This one seemed particularly promising as the title was: Hawaii: BBC Weather takes a look at the Maui fires)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66484635
But then I thought – maybe this isn’t fair. These are all relatively recent and therefore not a random sample. So I tried searching on “maui fire climate change”. That didn’t produce anything about the recent Maui fires. I have no doubt that somewhere the BBC has discussed the role of climate change in the Maui fires but it doesn’t seem to have been robotically tacked on to every report about this particular event.
**I first made this comment including links to the BBC stories that I mention but it got stuck “waiting for approval”. So I am repeating it without the links.**
I did a search on BBC website on “Maui Fire”. It produced far more links that I had time to explore so I just looked at the first 10. None of them mentioned climate change.
But then I thought – maybe this isn’t fair. These are all relatively recent and therefore not a random sample. So I tried searching on “maui fire climate change”. That didn’t produce anything about the recent Maui fires. I have no doubt that somewhere the BBC has discussed the role of climate change in the Maui fires but it doesn’t seem to have been robotically tacked on to every report about this particular event.